Trump: Rove 'hasn't done so well'

Donald Trump said Monday that President Obama “absolutely” should meet with the Iranian president this week, and he slammed Karl Rove for saying otherwise.

“He should absolutely meet. There is no question about it. I was listening to Karl Rove and others saying don’t meet. Well, Karl Rove hasn’t done so well,” Trump said in call-in to Fox News’s “Fox and Friends.”

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Trump was referring to comments Rove made during his appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” in which he said Obama should not sit down with newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during the United Nations General Assembly this week in New York. “No, don’t sit down with him. I mean first of all— look, he told a boldfaced lie in that interview, we don’t have a nuclear — we’ll never develop nuclear bomb. Who is he kidding?” Rove said of Rouhani’s interview with NBC’s Ann Curry.

Rove added that Rouhani is a “subtle thug” and called any meeting between Obama and the Iranian president a “concession” U.S. and “disheartening” to allies in the region.

“The concession is the president of the United States does what no president has done since the 1970s, and that sits down with leader of Iran and treats him as an equal. What they need to do is— and that would be disheartening in the region. Our allies in the region would say, what in the heck are you doing? Words are cheap. Let’s see some action from him,” Rove said before hitting Rouhani on Iran’s nuclear weapons and involvement with both Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

However, Trump acknowledged that he takes a different stance from many in the Republican party.

“I know I have a lot of Republican friends that say don’t meet, you know, hard liners where they say don’t meet. And I guess I’m the most hard line of all. It’s not weak to meet. You know you make deals, I mean, you do things. Now, it doesn’t mean weakness. You have a meeting, it may be good, it may be bad. You should take a very, very hard line, President Obama, extremely hard,” Trump said.